


All Men to Our Will

by draculard



Category: Hereditary (2018)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Child Abuse, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Incest, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Rape/Non-con Elements, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Ideation, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 18:40:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20140147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: You're way too high, Peter tells himself. For just a moment, the smoke in his lungs tastes like paint thinner.





	All Men to Our Will

For just a moment, the smoke in his lungs tastes like paint thinner. 

_ You’re way too high, _ Peter tells himself. He knows that isn’t true, though — he’s been sitting under the bleachers for three minutes max, not even long enough for the grass to leave stains on his jeans. This is his first hit. He’s not high.

He licks his lips and tastes acetone. He runs his tongue over his teeth, over his gums. He feels the sting of turpentine on his skin. Did Mom make him bathe in turpentine once? Is he imagining that? He remembers getting into her dollhouse paints, remembers crying as she scrubbed it off him in the bath — crying because it hurt, because he was naked, because she was touching him.

He takes a breath and lets the smoke out. He’s been holding it in his lungs too long.

It hits him.

He’s way too high.

* * *

He’s eight years old when Mom gets the call saying Uncle Chuck has died. She stands next to the wall, her mouth tight, her eyes far away. She holds the phone next to her ear and never strays from the charging station, even though it’s cordless. She’s forgotten there’s nothing tethering her to the wall.

Across the room, Peter watches her, glancing up from his old garage-sale GameBoy Advance, restlessly flipping it halfway-closed and then open again, slowly, on its hinges. He’s careful not to close it so far that the screen goes black, ending his game. 

He has something to tell her, but he waits. She yelled at him two years ago when he interrupted a phone call to ask for apple juice, and he hasn’t forgotten that. Worse, he’s supposed to be reading a Goosebumps book for the after-school reading program, and he knows there’s a chance that when he delivers his news, she’ll say, “That’s nice, but aren’t you supposed to be reading?”

He watches her. She worries her lip. She says, “How did he die?”

Peter doesn’t know what to make of that, except that this call must be from work or something, because the only old man in his family is Dad, who’s puttering around in the kitchen making a quiche. 

“Christ,” says Annie. She rubs her forehead; she closes her eyes. They’re dry, Peter notices. “I’m sorry, Mom. Do you — I mean, is there anything…. Do you need help with the — the funeral, or…?”

So she’s talking to Grandma. So one of Grandma’s old-man friends must have died. Peter doesn’t know any of them well enough to feel sad about it. He slowly flips his GameBoy screen forward, bringing it to a stop when the lights flicker, moving it back. He squirms on the sofa, bursting with news.

“Okay,” Annie says. “Well, look…”

She can never finish a sentence when Grandma’s on the phone. She listens. Peter watches her listening.

“Okay,” says Annie again. “I will. Goodbye, Mom.”

She doesn’t say “I love you,” to Grandma, but this time, because somebody’s died, she says “Goodbye, Mom,” with a stiff, somber tone, as befits the situation. Peter sits up straighter, his little hands tight on the GameBoy. 

He waits until she sighs and uncovers her eyes.

“Mom.”

She looks at him. Her eyes are still so far away.

“My Bulbasaur evolved,” says Peter, vibrating with excitement. She says nothing, so he sits still, waiting to see how she’ll react.

“Oh,” says Annie eventually. Another tense beat passes, and then she musters up a spark of interest. “Oh, he did, huh?”

“Yes!” Relieved, Peter jumps down from the sofa and hurries over, holding the GameBoy up for her to see. While she’s staring at the screen, distracted, Peter grabs onto her sleeve and prays she doesn’t notice. Her eyes flicker to him — to the top of his head, to the curly hair hiding his face from view — but she doesn’t say a word.

“That’s Ivysaur,” says Peter proudly. 

“I see.”

“He’s way more powerful than Bulbasaur.”

“Oh,” says Annie, nodding slowly. Her sleeve twitches in Peter’s fingers. She pulls away and Peter feels his face falling, but a moment later her hand closes over his. “I see,” says Annie again. “That’s wonderful, Peter.”

There’s something wrong in her voice. She’s still holding the cordless phone. 

“Peter…” she says. He watches her fingers squeeze around the off-white plastic casing on the phone, stained with ink from all the times she’s scrawled down information while talking to a client. She looks at the entrance to the kitchen, maybe hoping Dad will come into sight and rescue her.

Pans clattering against pans. The smell of green onions, sharp and fresh. The noise of an electric whisk.

“Mommy,” Peter says, and cuts himself off. He isn’t supposed to say ‘mommy’ anymore. The other kids at school all just say ‘mom,’ and he’s working on it. ‘Mommy’ is for babies. He clutches the GameBoy, the pad of his index finger brushing over the power button.

He loves how rough that little plastic button is. He loves how it bites into his skin. 

_ “Mommy,” _ he says again, against his will, and finally she lets go of his hand.

* * *

He doesn’t get hungry after he smokes. Instead, his ribs hurt on the right side of his body, like they’re stabbing into his stomach every time he sits down. He touches them gingerly, but they’re not sticking out anymore than normal. He can feel them shifting beneath his skin.

He lifts his shirt and tucks his chin into his chest, searching for bruises. There are none.

He breathes through his nose. He can’t get air.

He breathes through his mouth. Is his throat closing up?

A panic attack, or an anxiety attack, or whatever it’s called. He’s smart enough to know what’s happening to him. Charlie goes into anaphylactic shock — Charlie’s head hits the telephone pole as she’s struggling to breathe — and now this echo of her last few moments, every time he smokes. 

He’s not stupid. He knows it’s all in his head.

He lies down flat on his bed, above the covers, in a thick sweater he bought from the clearance aisle last year when he needed something warm to wear to school. It doesn’t do anything for him now. It’s like his lungs are made of ice, like his skin is hard and frozen. That’s why he can’t breathe. That’s why his ribs hurt.

They’re thawing.

* * *

He shouldn’t have mucked around in the dollhouse paint. He knows that. Charlie has her drawings (and she’s good for her age, the preschool teacher says — all the kids had to draw self-portraits today, and Charlie’s was shaped like a human, with little brown eyes and hair straight and yellow like straw, and the teacher said, _ I’ve never seen anything like that before. Most kids just pick their favorite colors and draw some squiggles and blobs.) _and Mom has her dollhouses, and Dad has his cooking.

What does Peter have? His self-portrait in pre-school was good, too. He remembers it, but the teacher doesn’t. He drew himself with a rifle next to a turkey, and Mom laughed when she saw it because he’d never been hunting before, and he wasn’t interested in it to begin with, and she couldn’t figure out why he would draw himself that way. 

She didn’t frame it. Peter doesn’t know where it is. But Charlie’s drawing is on the dining room wall now, framed with oak and hung where all can see.

He needs something of his own. He pushes the door of Mom’s workshop open.

He mucks around in the paint.

Even when he’s doing it, he knows it’s stupid. He dips Mom’s little horse-hair brushes into the pots and trails them over his skin, making multi-color patterns — swirls and triangles and misspelled words all blend together. He thinks of them as tattoos. He thinks maybe this is his thing, maybe he’s good at this, maybe this is something he can do for people to fawn over, like Charlie’s amazing drawings that the pre-school teacher’s never seen the likes of, like Dad’s cooking that everyone asks for at get-togethers, like Mom’s dollhouses that people pay good money for in galleries. 

Then Mom opens the door behind him and Peter sees the patterns on his arms for what they really are.

A waste of good paint.

* * *

He knows at first it was just water and soap in the bathtub. Water and soap and Mom’s hands scrubbing as hard as they can, making no difference on the paint dried to Peter’s skin. He watches Mom’s knuckles swell up and redden as she works on him; her face is drawn in a scowl, eyes big but dark, mouth small and tight.

She rolls her sleeves up to her elbows. Her arms are wiry, corded, her fingers long and smart. She digs her nails into Peter’s shoulder. She tries to scratch the paint off, but it doesn’t work. It just makes him cry.

That’s why it’s so confusing later — he’s hiding his face in his knees, embarrassed on so many accounts. On being naked, on getting a bath from his mother, at using up her paint like a stupid little kid. He doesn’t notice when she gives up on plain old water and soap.

She pours something else into the bathtub, something chemical, something that smells. He feels the acidic vapor clouding up his lungs.

“Mommy?”

She touches him roughly. Her fingers burn. The water stings. Her hands on his thighs, on his cheeks, on his neck, on his waist, on his cock.

“Mommy—”

Choking, drowning. On what? On the water? On turpentine? Later, he can’t remember. He swears she held his head under the water, swears his eyes were open and he could feel them burning, shriveling. He could feel the chemical sting. For days afterward, he was blind, or so near to it that he couldn’t read the blackboard at school, couldn’t recognize his friends or Mom or Dad or Charlie, couldn’t read his Goosebumps book or see the screen of his GameBoy.

Did he open his mouth to speak to her?

Did the chemicals flood his lungs?

* * *

Was it real? Is any of it?

* * *

_ Mommy. _

He thinks it, doesn’t say it. He wants her to come into the room and pull the blankets over him, because he’s cold and he can’t breathe and he can’t manage it. He wants her to come into the room and stand between his bed and Charlie’s like she did when they were little, when they were sleeping. He turns his head toward the wall, struggling to breathe, and imagines he can see her there in the corner, watching over him, protective and threatening and _ there. _

She hates him for what he did to Charlie. He knows it. He wants her to. If she didn’t hate him, he’d know it was a lie. She can smell the weed clinging to his clothes, knows he’s panicking, knows he’s drowning and it’s all his fault, it’s all because of what he’s done.

He sees a paint can in her hand, smells the thinner as she pours it over him, tastes the acetone on his lips.

He wants her to light the match.

He wants to be warm.


End file.
